Kings Release New Renderings Of Future Arena

Today marks a pretty monumental time for the Sacramento Kings, as they released their first renderings for the new arena they will call home starting in the 2016-2017 season. The Kings were as close as any franchise to being relocated to Seattle as recently as last season when a Seattle-based group made a strong bid to buy the team from the Maloof brothers. However, Indian businessman Vivek Ranadive swooped in to buy a controlling stake in the team and keep them in Sacramento.

Finalizing a plan to get a new arena was as important as any to keeping the team from re-locating outside of California. The deal to purchase land, known as Downtown Plaza, for the site was finalized last week and construction is expected to start this summer. The sum for which Ranadive and his group paid for the land plot was unknown.

Ranadive was quoted in a press release saying, “When we bought the Sacramento Kings, we committed to the NBA and to the people of Sacramento that we wouldn’t just build a new arena, but that we’d build a world-class entertainment venue, an arena truly for the 21st century. Today is another major step forward in that effort.” Ranadive later said in the video, “It is going to be cashless, ticket-less, an experience like none other. It is NBA 3.0.”

The building of the arena will be taking place on the site of an old mall, giving people a visualization of the size of the place this is going. The most intriguing part of the new renderings is the sheer mass of the atrium and entrance. There is a 7,500 foot grand entrance that will be made completely out of glass and can open up horizontally. 17,000 people can fit inside but as President Chris Granger says in the video, they can be joined by a whole city because of a 50×100-foot window that overlooks the lower bowl where the court is from the outside.

The arena interior will be designed by AECOM and will have similarities to the home courts of the Houston Rockets and Indiana Pacers because of a massive video board that will hang down at mid-court. There will be nice views inside the stadium as clean, open concourses will deliver unobstructed looks at the court.

This new stadium has been long in making, as talks have been taking place for the better part of the decade to get a new arena. The current arena, Sleep Train Arena, is aging and was opened in 1988 outside the downtown area. The work put into the new $448 million dollar arena plan was extensive, as meetings were held over the past six months brainstorming different ideas. There were even 20,000 public responses from a survey that the Kings released to the public. The city of Sacramento is on the hook for $258 million of the projected cost, as the Kings will cover the remaining $190 million.